Dear Diary,
“Simply observe,” I read in a photo of a page from a book my mother sent me, above which a section heading proudly proclaimed – “Meditation”. I smiled. I’m almost one hundred percent certain that in the first meditation pamphlet that came into my hands some fifteen years ago, those same two words stood. Because those two words appear in any printed or electronic work that has the word “Meditation” in its title. And I’m almost one hundred percent certain that upon leafing through that pamphlet I exclaimed “Simply observe? Easy! Just hold my beer…” – which led to that now second-decade-long quest to learn perhaps the most difficult thing in life. To learn to simply observe.
Sometimes you sit in the evening at your favorite bench in Kalniečiai Park with your favorite coffee-filled thermos mug in your hands, and out of long-standing habit the events of the past work day buzz in your head, you lift your eyes from the rippling pond surface and gaze into the distance. What do I see, you think? Around you – Kaunas, a cozy and green Lithuanian city. Lithuania, which is periodically shaken by bigger or smaller scandals. Lithuania where perhaps not everything is as good as one might wish, but thank God there are those who are to blame for that. So one can easily grumble a bit, although in truth it’s not entirely clear whether that grumbling will change anything.
No, something isn’t right. You lower your eyes back to the rippling water and after a moment lift them again, into the distance. You realize that Kaunas and all of Lithuania, where not everything is as good as you’d wish, was painted onto the existing view by your own imagination and musings. In reality, it’s simply an evening park around you. On a bench on the other side of the pond, a couple chatting lovingly. A golden retriever lazily moseying along, dragging an equally lazy owner for a walk. A duck savoring a found piece of bread and a crow watching it with envious eyes. A slightly oversized, probably bought to grow into, bicycle-riding and laughing little girl.
Better now. Much better. But something still isn’t right. You lower your eyes and lift them a third time.
Around you – peace. In its purest form. No Kaunas, no Lithuania. No past, no future, no expectations, no duties, no grievances. No contemplations and analysis. No park, no couple, no retriever, no duck, no little girl. They, of course, haven’t disappeared anywhere, but now they are simply component elements of that slowly undulating, all-encompassing peace, tightly connected by invisible but firm bonds holding them all together. Remove any one of them and, it seems, a hole would open in the peace into some cold, dark and unpleasant vacuum. No, nothing of everything around you needs to be removed, nor can it be – everything is already ideally in its time and just as ideally in its place. And at the epicenter of it all – you. Cozily wrapped in the embrace of surrounding peace, savoring a sense of wholeness and somewhere deep down as if knowing that at this very moment you have touched something that truly has real, and not invented, meaning and value.
How wonderful that after all the invested effort it succeeds at least a dozen times a day to simply observe. Even if it takes the third time :-)
